Confessions of a house hoarder

EssexHebridean

Fingers crossed on the mortgage, and well done on the potatoes too, not least as it leaves me able to use my "I chit you not" line as last seen by Pippi on instagram... :rotfl::rotfl: #SorryNotSorry

18 degrees next week you say? It'd be just LOVELY if the Hebrides would like to reach those heights, to...however I fear not!

cazmanian_minx

Jessy103 wrote: »

I will cross my fingers and toes for you and hope the lender changes their mind! I've never visited the Highlands or Scotland for that matter but after reading your blog it is definitely somewhere I would look at going especially if I can find somewhere that is dog friendly. I'm sure my dogs would love having a good run round all that land and on the beach!

One of the nice things about having all these fields is that even though we're a village full of sheep, I should always be able to make a field available for off-lead exercise

mfmaybe wrote: »

That's a worry about the mortgage. Do you have other options in terms of lenders?

(although I'm not clear, is it the potential purchase this refers to, or Ethel's house?)

The potential purchase - Ethel's isn't mortgageable until I've bought the land it sits on.

EssexHebridean wrote: »

Fingers crossed on the mortgage, and well done on the potatoes too, not least as it leaves me able to use my "I chit you not" line as last seen by Pippi on instagram... :rotfl::rotfl: #SorryNotSorry

18 degrees next week you say? It'd be just LOVELY if the Hebrides would like to reach those heights, to...however I fear not!

*groan* Hopefully the weather is being kind to you!

Anyway, news! Firstly, some April scores on the doors.

Typing work - £945.09
eBay sales - £107.44 (after PayPal fees, before eBay fees and postage)
MB - £194.76

Total - £1,247.29, so just about struggling over my £1,200. I keep wondering why the typing is down so much and then remembering that I'm spending hours working on the house, so it's not surprising.

First mortgage company still said no and the broker at that point said that unless we could get the right rental valuation for a buy-to-let mortgage and were prepared to let it on that basis, there was nothing more he could do. So I rang a specialist holiday let broker I'd found online and he said that for a loan that small it would be uneconomic to get him involved, but as far as he knew there was only one lender who'd do a holiday let mortgage of that size in our location and he gave me their name.

I spoke to them last week, had two telephone interviews, and the upshot is that as long as we can get a written estimate from a holiday letting company to say that they believe the house will achieve annual income after fees of 125% of mortgage interest stress-tested to 6%, then they're definitely interested and also happy to lend on Ethel's once we get the title, so we can pay off the 0% cards.

It turns out that the letting company I was looking at using does free no-obligation visits to provide advice, so their area rep is coming to see me a week today to look at both houses and give me some pointers about what it's worth doing, what it's not worth doing and how much to invest in the furniture - as if she tells me that Ethel's will only ever achieve a maximum of £500 a week, I'm not going to blow a fortune on furniture, whereas if she tells me that if I do a top-notch finish I could get £800 a week, then that's worth splashing a bit of cash on decent matching stuff.

I've also heard back about buying the ground Ethel's house sits on. £150 for the land itself (hooray!) but I also need to pay for their solicitor to draw up the offer of sale (£280+VAT) and the drawings office to prepare the plans to go with the offer (£300+VAT). I'll then have my solicitor's fee on top of that (probably another £200), so it's actually going to cost many times more in legal fees, but at the end of it the house will have a title deed and will be on the Registers of Scotland, so it's well worth doing.

I spent yesterday happily trundling around a field on my tractor cutting rushes and as a result I can barely move my arms today - no power steering on a vintage Massey Ferguson 35! I now need to harrow it and the old spike harrow we dug out of one of the other fields and used on it last year virtually disintegrated. I'm told that since I've got a tractor I'm better off getting a frame-mounted one, because it'll make it easier to take down the road between fields, but I'm looking at about £825+VAT for a new one - may have to go and smile very sweetly at a neighbour and see if I can borrow his, he did offer last year.

Then in the afternoon I was footling about on the internet, having decided I deserved half a day off, decided to do a casino offer I'd been sent a promotional email for by one of the big bookmakers, and an hour later was £260 better off :D:D Let's hope that's a sign that May is going to be successful!

cazmanian_minx

I have a to-do list that covers two pages of A4, consisting of 41 items (mainly 'declutter [room]', 'clean [room]'!) and in a day and a half I've managed to tick off seven of them. Need to speed up, as it all needs to be done by Tuesday lunchtime!

AlexLK

Brilliant news re. the mortgage.

Had just replied to your comment on my diary stating I've always wanted a MF 35! I am rather envious now, Caz. :rotfl:

...Think I'm going to have to take the offer of some land from the farmer next door to get one now ...

cazmanian_minx

Tidying/decluttering nearly there, cleaners are coming tomorrow, so I'll wait for them to do their stuff and then do the bits they don't do tomorrow afternoon (like washing down the walls where the dogs have shaken themselves after coming in from the garden!). The garden still needs work, but all borders bar one have been weeded and it looks a lot better than it did. I've also got the ingredients for my secret weapon - chocolate fudge cupcakes - which will be made tomorrow night!

I'm sitting up waiting for a bookmaker to settle an accumulator so I can double-check that their calculation of my winnings matches mine. A week into May and I've just gone over the £400 profit mark for the month, more than double the whole of April already. I could really do with taking some of it out, but I don't really want any bookmaker transactions appearing on my bank statements until after the one month of transactions required by the mortgage company has been sent off.

I've also had a nice evening scouting round the property websites If the current house we're trying to buy doesn't come off (and I really hope it does) then there are a number of alternative candidates, albeit none of them quite so convenient as the current target and none with quite the same benefits.

I went out onto the common grazings with the grazings committee clerk today - the crofts we bought have peat-cutting rights attached to them, but as the previous tenant's partner used to just wander around cutting from wherever he felt like, nobody could quite remember which my official banks were, so I've been allocated a set which hasn't been cut for at least 14 years. The last cut from it is still up there, stacked in herringbones to dry out, so I need to go back up there in the truck, load it up and then bring it back down to stack. It's ready to burn with a little drying to get the moor dampness off it, but after more than a decade lying on the ground, it crumbles when you pick it up - I may just come home with half a tonne of compost!

cazmanian_minx

Small numbers milestones:

First £1,000 paid off the holiday let
Mortgage on home under £115k

Interest just crept over the £100 mark again thanks to writing a large cheque for half of what it's costing to have the barn roof put back on, but not by much.

cazmanian_minx

Great Scott, those dancing bananas are NOT supposed to be that big and I can't seem to downsize them!!! (They resize back to the original when I save the edit to the post!)

EatingTheElephant

Those bananas have made me smile even though I'm grumpy at waking up so stupidly early today, huge bananas for great milestones

Jessy103

I love those bananas!!! Lol!

cazmanian_minx

I make absolutely no apology for the following:



Guess how much the rental estimates came in at? Go on, have a go. I've come clean on the blog now, so I'll come clean here - we would be moving into the potential purchase and porting our mortgage, the second holiday let would be the home we currently live in, which is a 3-bed croft house and a separate 1-bed annexe. The magic number we needed for the mortgage was £9,600 after letting agency fees.

Everyone written their guess down? Right, sit down, because I nearly fell off my chair when she went through the figures.

Our house and the annexe (let as 2 separate units) - conservative estimate after fees of £20,860!!!
Ethel's house - conservative estimate after fees of £13,344!!!

That's about £14,000 more a year than I was just about daring to hope for and means that I am now (a) head down into the paperwork to get the mortgage application banged in and (b) back to plastering like a demon to get Ethel's finished and available to let ASAP.